1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for recognizing an accessory of a portable terminal. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and a method for automatically recognizing a type of an accessory mounted in an interface unit using current detection and voltage detection.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, with significant advances and development of information, communication, and semiconductor technologies, the use of portable terminals has rapidly increased. More particularly, recent portable terminals incorporate mobile convergence advances in which the portable terminal provides additional functions as well as the traditional functions such as placing a call. A representative mobile communication terminal provides various functions including a TV watching function (e.g., mobile broadcast such as Digital Multimedia Broadcasting (DMB)) or Digital Video Broadcasting (DVB), a music play function (e.g., MPEG Audio Layer-3 (MP3)), a photographing function, and an Internet access function as well as general communication functions such as voice call, and message transmission and reception.
The portable terminal provides an interface unit in which an accessory is mounted. The accessory may be a 3 pole earphone, a 4 pole earphone, a TV-OUT cable, and a text telephone (TTY) cable connecting with a device providing a TTY service. In recent years, to support a miniaturization trend of portable terminals, the number of portable terminals using a 3.5 mm connector with four terminals as the interface unit has been increased. Typically, when mounting of the accessory is detected, the conventional portable terminal with the 3.5 mm connector displays a pop-up menu displaying a type of the accessory, and allows a user to select the type of the mounted accessory from the pop-up menu. However, the method for recognizing the mounted accessory using the pop-up menu is inconvenient because the user must select a type of the accessory each time the accessory is mounted. Therefore, there is a need for an improved apparatus and method for recognizing an accessory of a portable terminal.